The UK could hardly have chosen a more difficult moment to reinvent itself as a global actor. Its most important bilateral and institutional relationships are in flux.
Britain’s circles of influence
Since 1945, British governments have had to manage what can be described as four ‘circles’ of international interest and leverage. These encapsulate continental Europe; the US; a small group of strategically important countries with whom the quality of bilateral relations has had an outsized effect on UK prosperity and security, including China, Japan, Russia and Saudi Arabia; and the rest of the world, with the Commonwealth providing some additional connectivity to an otherwise heterogeneous set of relationships.
Recasting the UK’s relations with any one of these countries or groups has proved very difficult in the past, and has carried unintended consequences. Trying to retain the British empire after the Second World War turned out to be a lost cause, even as it led Winston Churchill to dismiss the alternative of the UK being a founding member of a more united Europe. Recasting the ‘special relationship’ with the US after the debacle of the Suez crisis was a major success for the Harold Macmillan government in the 1960s, but it cost him Britain’s first shot at joining the then European Economic Community. Trying to strike the right mix of engagement with and detachment from the process of European integration proved politically corrosive for the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. Tony Blair’s efforts to find a third way for relations with the EU foundered on his commitment to the US and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Having entered government committed to ‘stop banging on about Europe’, David Cameron tried to reconnect the UK with the world’s rising powers (a forerunner of Boris Johnson’s idea of a ‘Global Britain’) and opened what some anticipated would be a ‘golden era’ in relations with China. This plan failed, after Cameron chose to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and the ensuing referendum consumed his premiership.
Today, Britain faces a truly daunting task. In the coming years, its government will have to reset its relations with countries not within one or two of these circles, but across each circle simultaneously. And, if this were not enough, the international context into which a newly independent ‘Global Britain’ was meant to slot so easily no longer corresponds, if it ever did, to its proponents’ vision. Each of Britain’s four circles of influence is in flux.
Stuck with Europe
In some ways, the relationship with the EU may prove the most straightforward to reset. Despite the acrimony that surrounded Britain’s withdrawal from the EU and departure from its single market and customs union, geographic proximity and deep economic interconnections will force the UK government and its European counterparts towards constant compromise around their future co-existence. The net result, however, is that the UK will end up spending more time managing its relationship with EU institutions and member states than it did when it was an EU member, not least because the EU will continue to evolve.
The prospects of EU collapse are remote. Instead, in the wake of the 2008–10 global financial crisis, Brexit, the emergence of a more confrontational US and now the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a palpable desire within the EU for it to have greater strategic as well as economic autonomy. This goal should be easier to achieve with the UK no longer at the table constantly seeking to limit the EU’s accretion of institutional power.
In some ways, the relationship with the EU may prove the most straightforward to reset.
Nevertheless, this desire will struggle against the inward focus of the EU’s main business, and the tensions this reveals between the Union’s intergovernmental and supranational identities. Each step towards deeper integration – the latest being its €750 billion pandemic recovery fund – evokes a counter-reaction within and between member states. The deepening divergence in economic fortunes that COVID-19 is causing between member states will exacerbate underlying tensions, especially between economically harder-hit countries in the EU’s southwest and better-prepared ones in the northeast. This tension between the search for greater European strategic autonomy and its internal limits will leave space for constructive engagement between the UK and the EU on issues of global governance and foreign policy.
Most EU members gain foreign policy influence by banding together under the EU banner, even if collective action is hard to develop and execute. But for the UK, the process of agreeing common foreign policy positions among 28 states with distinct histories, cultures, national interests and capabilities was not only time-consuming and distracting, but increasingly disempowering. As a non-member, the UK will no longer continually have to resist an extension of EU competence into aspects of its foreign and security policy. And the more uncertain the world is beyond Europe, the more the UK and its continental counterparts will try to band together. This tendency has been visible since the Brexit referendum, with the UK and the EU adopting common positions on Iran, the Middle East peace process and World Trade Organization (WTO) reform, as well as in preparations for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in November 2021.
A diminished special relationship
EU–UK cooperation on foreign policy has been encouraged by the antagonistic and unpredictable foreign policies of the Trump administration. The outcome of the US presidential election on 3 November 2020 will have a profound effect on the style, content and impact of US foreign policymaking. When Joe Biden enters the White House at the end of January 2021, he will bring with him an experienced team of foreign policy professionals who understand the value of international alliances. They will seek to repair frayed relations with traditional allies, although they will also expect an acceptance of America’s return to a global leadership role.
While the forthcoming presidential transition is of great consequence globally, the essence of the US–UK relationship is unlikely to change much. The US will remain Britain’s most important ally in the true sense of the term: the country on which the UK depends existentially for its security, and with which it has the closest and most extensive bilateral security relationship, stretching from nuclear to intelligence cooperation. In return, the UK will remain a natural partner in US alliance-building and coalition action. Securing British military assistance for US policies and deployments in the Gulf, Afghanistan or the South China Sea, for example, will remain important to US policymakers, even if UK contributions are relatively small in material terms.
But Biden and his administration will know that the UK has lost one of its most important assets as an ally, which was to bring its influential voice to bear in EU decision-making. And EU decisions will be of ever greater importance to the US – whether on sanctions towards Iran and Russia, or on the regulation and taxation of US technology giants. Future US administrations will therefore target a greater share of their diplomatic effort towards the EU and key EU bilateral relationships, principally with Paris and Berlin. The UK will constantly need to fight its way to the table in these transatlantic negotiations, now that it has lost its automatic seat as an EU member. If the US cannot come to agreement on a particular matter with the EU, then securing UK buy-in on a US policy position, potentially as a counterweight to the EU, will be a next best option for decision-makers in Washington, as was the case over the Trump administration’s efforts to eject the Chinese technology firm Huawei from constructing 5G telecommunications networks in Europe.
Regardless, as a non-EU member, the UK will come under greater bilateral pressure than before to demonstrate its loyalty to the US, or risk paying a price as the junior partner in the relationship. The test for British governments will be whether they can turn the UK’s greater policy autonomy and nimbleness as a non-EU member into an asset in the relationship with the US.
End of a golden era?
The UK has left the EU and enters a new phase in its relations with the US at a time when the world beyond the North Atlantic community is in turmoil. One of the main drivers of this turmoil is the seemingly inexorable rise of China. China’s mix of growing economic influence and diplomatic assertiveness is not only a challenge to the UK individually; it will also be a central feature of Britain’s relations with the EU, the US and other diplomatic partners.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has reasserted authoritarian controls that it had eased in the reformist period during and after Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. President Xi’s recentralization of power and drive to create around himself a cult of personality reminiscent of the Mao era pose new domestic risks to China’s development, as fealty replaces initiative and experimentation among China’s public and private sector leaders. In this context, the detention of some 1 million Uighurs in re-education camps, their placement into forced labour programmes, the now-regular arrests of Chinese human rights lawyers and the roll-out of an Orwellian social credit system are narrowing the scope for China to maintain constructive relations with democratic states, including the UK.
China’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 exposed the negative effects of the opaque and secretive culture of the CPC. Watching Beijing instrumentalize its medical support to afflicted countries for diplomatic gain was all the more galling for Western policymakers. But as US and European criticism of China’s role in the COVID-19 outbreak grew, party officials in Beijing saw the criticism as further evidence that the West would resist China’s return to being a regional and world power. ‘Wolf warrior’ diplomats outdid each other in challenging Western narratives about COVID-19, while Chinese intelligence agents appear to have amplified disinformation about US and other governments’ responses to the virus.
Combined with the decision by the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, in May 2020 to impose a draconian national security law on Hong Kong, the growing estrangement between a more authoritarian and globally assertive China and much of the rest of the world has exposed the overambition of the joint political rhetoric in 2015 about establishing a ‘golden era’ in relations between the UK and China. Instead, there has been an inevitable anti-China backlash in the UK, as there has been across all Western countries.
The short-lived ‘golden era’ in Sino-British relations – to the extent that it ever existed – is therefore over. More to the point, as bipartisan US opposition to China’s growing global influence deepens, the US, the UK and other US allies may slip into a new form of economic Cold War, involving investment restrictions, targeted sanctions and a decoupling of their technological sectors, with Taiwan an ever-present potential flashpoint.
The UK is having to choose between the world’s two largest markets, rather than being free to engage fully with both as it had intended.
There will be little, if any, scope for Britain to demonstrate its new global ambitions by prioritizing its economic relationship with China. Instead, the UK is having to choose in effect between the world’s two largest markets, rather than being free to engage fully with both as it had intended. And, when forced to pick sides, its inescapable choice will be in favour of the US, given Britain’s dependence on the US for its security and the close political, economic and cultural ties between the two countries.
The new ideological divide
The differences with the US–Soviet Cold War, however, will also be notable. China does not enjoy the support of a military alliance equivalent to the Warsaw Pact or, indeed, any reliable group of allies to amplify the risks posed by its growing military reach. Nor does China appear to want to establish itself as an alternative pole to the West. On the other hand, most of America’s allies today lack a shared unity of purpose towards managing China’s rise, given the absence of a clear threat from China to their survival and the fact that they benefit from its economic growth. To the contrary, there is an overwhelming desire among most governments and peoples – whether China’s neighbours or its distant trading partners – to remain non-aligned in the face of this neo-Cold War and to resist becoming part of a securitization of the US stand-off with China.
But history is replete with examples of how fear and mistrust between an established great power and a new contender can overcome the best intentions on both sides, as Graham Allison and others have persuasively argued. And, despite frequent commentary to the contrary, there is a growing ideological dimension to the stand-off between China and the US. The world is witnessing the re-emergence of a struggle between, on the one hand, governments and societies that tend to prize the liberty of their citizens – supported by representative systems of governance and strong civil societies – and, on the other, governments that to a greater or lesser extent expect their citizens to subsume their individual liberty to social stability and the sovereignty of the state. Most of the latter group view the checks and balances that provide accountability in liberal democracies as an unacceptable challenge to state authority, and civil society as a threat.
Although their respective leaders have profoundly different backgrounds and motivations, China and Russia are standard-bearers of the authoritarian system. Russia goes as far as to engage in political warfare to undermine the cohesion of democracies that its leadership perceives as threatening its own future security, using the openness of democracies’ political systems against them. But China and Russia are not alone. The huge material benefits available to those who fight their way to the top to lead authoritarian countries mean that the spread of free and open societies so hoped for after 1989 has at best ground to a halt and, in many cases, is receding, even in Europe.
In the meantime, Russia under Vladimir Putin and China under Xi have sought to buffer their national systems by creating new groupings of states that either subscribe to similar political approaches or are happy to show solidarity. Turkey and India – two priorities for the UK’s post-Brexit economic diplomacy – are among the countries whose governments readily participate in or attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a grouping of states led by Beijing and Moscow designed to resist the penetration of Western interests and values in Eurasia.
The emergence of this new divide in international affairs – between open societies where citizens have the capacity to fight for their rights and those where these rights are denied – was perhaps inevitable. The transformative learning moment of the end of the Second World War has receded into history, and the hope that accompanied the end of the Cold War has been diluted by the re-emergence of atavistic fears as the centre of global economic gravity has shifted from the West to the East. This divide will complicate the UK’s ability to deepen its diplomatic and commercial relations with many of the world’s most populous countries and fastest-growing economies.
Multilateralism at bay
Equally important has been the erosion of the idea among many Americans that the US should carry the principal burdens of leading international institutions ostensibly dedicated to spreading the values and rules of open societies. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 served as a wake-up call, inside the US and beyond, that many Americans had not benefited from post-1990 globalization, or from the institutions that promoted the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’. The 2020 US presidential election showed how many voters continue to appreciate an administration that focused on ‘America First’.
The US’s loss of confidence in the multilateral trading system has meant the return to a more protectionist, nation-first approach to international trade. Even post-Trump, it is hard to see Joe Biden or his immediate successors pivoting back to the mantra of free trade that the Johnson government in the UK so confidently asserts, especially after the costs of the COVID-19 pandemic compound the structural inequalities that have caused such deep divisions in American society. If the US remains unconvinced of the domestic benefits of the international trading system, few others will step up to take its leadership role. This means that the WTO, the institution on which the UK will now have to rely far more to uphold the rules governing international trade, may remain obstructed, even if the Biden administration lifts its predecessor’s block on new appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body.
Furthermore, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the risks of economic interdependence. Policymakers around the world are trying to shorten supply chains, bring more manufacturing onshore and place new checks on foreign investment. They are less supportive of the ‘just in time’ means of production and import and export processes that were the hallmark of the hyperglobalized pre-pandemic trading system. The retreat from the idea of ever more open global markets – on which the idea of a ‘Global Britain’ relies – will accelerate if the EU succeeds in establishing a border carbon adjustment mechanism as part of its commitment to the Paris Agreement climate goals. Such a mechanism would enable EU companies to compete on a level playing field with imports from countries that have lower or no restrictions on the carbon intensity of their manufactures. Depending on how the US, China and other countries with high-carbon-emitting industries respond, Britain may have to follow the EU lead on this new trade measure or be left to negotiate its way through a complex new thicket of global obstacles to international trade.
The danger is that the return to realist, ‘me first’ international relations and weak international institutions masks the historic scale and interconnected nature of the challenges facing all countries, including the UK.
Overall, international institutions which the US and UK jointly conceived in the 1940s, including the UN Security Council and the Bretton Woods agencies, have lost much of their influence. The credibility of the UN Human Rights Council has been undermined by the election of states associated with severe human rights abuses. Major international agencies are also having to compete with a smorgasbord of alternative institutions and arrangements, from the G20 to the BRICS summits to regional initiatives such as the newly agreed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). These more informal institutions are designed to facilitate political co-existence and economic gain between states on different political journeys. But they are not clubs of the like-minded, committed to enforcing or enlarging the rules of liberal democracy and transparent markets.
The danger is that this return to realist, ‘me first’ international relations and weak international institutions masks the historic scale and interconnected nature of the challenges facing all countries, including the UK. But it also offers an opportunity. Helping liberal democracies face up to these shared challenges while building consensus with others for common action would be a worthy goal for Britain after Brexit.
